Practice: Director, Environmental Advocacy Project, Center for Law and Social Responsibility, New England Law | Boston.

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Convoluted plots, nail-biting suspense, and a world that’s morally adrift—what’s not to love in the old noir mysteries? The Asphalt Jungle, The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, and The Big Sleep are favorites both in print and on film. Noir presents the justice system as just one element of society, as prone to corruption as any other. It’s an escapist genre, but it’s built on the grittiest elements of reality. My favorite writers include the original noir greats Raymond Chandler and Cornell Woolrich, the Euro-noir dark lit stars like Derek Raymond, and today’s noir heavies such as Jason Starr and James Sallis.

I will always count Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action as a personal favorite. I was a practicing environmental lawyer in Boston at the time the book came out, so I knew a lot about the events and even some of the characters. Fortunately, none of my friends were major players in the case. The lawyers do not come off in a very positive light.

Professor Allison M. Dussias

Teaching: American Indian law, business organizations, indigenous peoples’ rights, property.

Daniel Richter’s Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America is a great read if you want to understand the development of the law in its historical context. Richter shifts the focus from a fixation on the westward extension of white settlement to the experiences and understanding of tribal members looking eastward from Indian country. It fosters a much broader understanding of the development of American Indian law and policy.

My Life in San Juan Pueblo is a rich collection of both traditional and personal stories by the gifted Tewa storyteller and language teacher Esther Martinez. Her book and her words on the accompanying CD give me a great appreciation for the worldview, values, and sense of kinship and belonging that have been at the heart of the San Juan Pueblo community for hundreds of years.

Milner Ball’s Called by Stories: Biblical Sagas and Their Challenge for Law is also on my list. Ball explores the ways in which biblical stories (primarily the stories of Moses and Rachel and the Gospel of John) intersect with law, conceptions of justice, and the practice of law. He ties insights from these stories to contemporary issues like Native Hawaiian sovereignty in a thought-provoking and moving way.

A film I keep going back to is Children of Men (2006). It drives home a deceptively trivial but important insight into how much our present hopes and aspirations are predicated upon our ability to pass on what we have accomplished to others. Despite its bleak depiction of a future defined by individual concerns, the film manages to leave me with a sense of hope—embodied in one tiny newborn.

Practice: environmental, land use, Internet, and government enforcement litigator; former law clerk, New Hampshire Superior Court and N.H. Supreme Court.

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Miracle on 34th Street—the original 1947 version, with Maureen O’Hara, John Payne, and Edmund Gwenn—has lots of lawyerly action, including that famous scene near the film’s end in which Payne, as lawyer Fred Gailey, demonstrates that Gwenn’s Kris Kringle really is Santa Claus. But the most interesting bit is earlier, when Gene Lockhart’s Judge Harper declines to summarily conclude that Kringle is insane because he is advised that such an unpopular determination could cost him re-election to his judicial post. Right there, in a single marvelous scene, is the entire debate over whether judges should be democratically elected or appointed by the chief executive. And the arguments begin anew over what we should expect from our judges whenever the president has the opportunity to nominate someone to the United States Supreme Court.

Michael Clayton is a thriller that happens to concern the work of lawyers. But the filmmakers did their research. A small army of associates works late into the night to close a deal, and their looks of concentration, distraction, and abject disinterest are just right. Better still is George Clooney’s title character as he slowly pieces together the central puzzle of the plot and the ethical dilemma at its heart. (SPOILER ALERT) With his decision at the film’s end, he finds his moral compass—the one that is available to all lawyers in similar circumstances—leading to a sense of justice.

Anyone who is considering law school should read Scott Turow’s One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School. And everyone who has decided to attend law school should then read it again after the first year to see whether it really spoke to their law school experience. These days, hopefully, it does not. I believe the first year of law school has changed more since the publication of Turow’s book in 1997 than in the previous 80 years. The experience is now decidedly more humane. Still, an important part of it is unchanged—the teaching of legal principles and their application in a handful of doctrinal areas through a question and answer methodology. When it works well, it pushes students to think about the logical connections between what courts have decided before and what that experience tells us about how they would resolve related issues today. It’s a skill that distinguishes lawyers from everyone else. It remains at the core of the first-year experience.